[MIDDLETON, Thomas (1580-1627)]

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£ 8 820
Auction dateClassic
13.12.2023 11:00UTC +01:00
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CHRISTIE'S
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United Kingdom, London
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ID 1105584
Lot 80 | [MIDDLETON, Thomas (1580-1627)]
[MIDDLETON, Thomas (1580-1627)]

Michaelmas Terme. As it hath been sundry times acted by the Children of Paules. London: printed [by Thomas Purfoot and Edward Allde] for A. I[ohnson], 1607.

The exceptionally rare first edition of a satirical drama on the social and sexual dynamics of Jacobean London. We are unable to trace any other complete copy at auction, nor any substantially complete copy at auction since 1956. Set in St Paul’s Cathedral and first performed by the troupe of boy actors known as the Children of Pauls in 1604, Michaelmas Term is Middleton’s third play and was written shortly before his collaboration with William Shakespeare on Timon of Athens (1606). The most overtly homoerotic of Middleton’s plays, signalling from the start his ‘main interest in the social, sexual, and class relations of men’ (Paster), it is also ‘undoubtedly the maturest’ of his moral satires (Chatterji). ESTC S112589 (listing 15 copies worldwide); R. Chatterji, ‘Unity and Disparity Michaelmas Term’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 8, No. 2, (Spring, 1968); G. Paster (ed.), Michaelmas Term (2000).



Small quarto (175 x 122mm). Woodcut title vignette, head-and tailpieces (washed and pressed, a single catchword just trimmed). Full red crushed morocco gilt by Bedford (upper board detached). Provenance: David Adee (his sale, Bangs & Co., 18-21 November 1895, lot 599).

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